Tomb Raider

In my recent discussions of gender-related marketing missteps various companies made at E3, I highlighted the Tomb Raider demonstration that was part of the Microsoft press event.

Over the course of the week since E3 and since I wrote my first complaint on the matter, I've received rather a lot of push-back about that choice.  Some see and hear the same problems I did; others only see a 2012 game they're interested in playing, and question where offense might possibly be given.

Let me state clearly and up front: I do not know if I have a problem with this game.  I have not played it; no-one has.  It won't be available until 2012.  As it happens I quite like the genre (not to mention my interest in having more female protagonists) and so on a personal level I actually strongly hope that the game is better than its debut.  The important thing to understand is this: "I have problems with this marketing and with the way in which the designers and publishers chose to present this game and this character" is not the same statement as "this game sucks."

And in fact, I have problems with this marketing, and with the way in which the designers and publishers chose to present this game and this character.

Here's the demo in question:

My major objections mainly stem from the first 1:00 of the video.  Try this exercise: put on your headphones or speakers, hit "play," and then either close your eyes or bring up another window over the video so that you can't see it.

Would you be comfortable with someone hearing you listening to that, but unable to see your screen?  What do you think they'd think you're watching?  Do you hear a strong, in-charge, admirable protagonist?

I hear the victimization of a young woman.  I hear a vulnerable girl breathing heavily, in pain and in fear.  I hear unpleasant overtones and associations.  And what I hear makes me squirm in my seat uncomfortably, cringing, while I watch it to write this post -- because the way I hear it, I can't tell if the player is meant to be put in Lara's position, or to fetishize it.

And so that's where we begin: with Lara tied up, squirming, in shadows, and then moaning and screaming for the player's benefit.  This is our introduction to this character: bound, scared, and squealing.  It's the first we see of her, the opening line of the story this demo wants to tell us, the first impression.  It doesn't just happen along the way; this is where we come in.

I get that they want to replace the damsel in distress trope with the strong girl rescues herself one.  And I do approve of that message, in one way.  In another way, both add up to victimization of a female character, and that's a pattern our current stories don't exactly lack.

The issue is that while they've made Lara Croft a physically and visually strong and determined character (and I do appreciate her plausible physical build and sensible pants), they choose at every moment to undermine that with her screams, her fear, and her injuries.  I don't know of a similar male hero whose injuries, sustained while playing, are ever so graphically painful and detrimental.**

And as it happens, this year's E3 gave us as good an immediate compare-and-contrast as we're going to get.  The Uncharted franchise was inspired by Tomb Raider, and now the Tomb Raider reboot, in turn, owes some inspiration to Uncharted.  The Continuing Adventures of Nathan Drake, The Attractive Everyman Version of Lara, had a debut demo during Sony's press conference.

Listen to what they chose to present of Nathan Drake at the Sony press event: Drake grunts.  He groans.  He shouts.  He comments snarkily.  He exhibits strong displeasure with being shot at.  He suffers.  But he's not victimized.  Drake is an active agent in his own demo, choosing to be on the ship where the story we're shown begins.  It's not, "Oh no!  They must have heard me [screaming]!"  He doesn't want to be found, so he doesn't run around screaming.

In these five-minute videos, we see two different explorations of character.  With Drake, we see strength through action.  With Lara, we see "strength" created by showcasing vulnerability.  His demo opens with active behavior; hers opens with reactive behavior.  Can you imagine the two characters' roles reversed?  Because that's the real problem.  I can, in fact, and I would play those games -- but instead, we have yet another fragile woman.  This Lara Croft, in this demo, deliberately has a physical and emotional vulnerability that earlier incarnations of her character did not have, and that is not generally present in male characters.  It's not progressive just because they're doing it to Lara Croft; it's regressive because we've tread this ground before.

This desire to take our strong female player character and literally torture her isn't actually all in my head.  Or if it is, I'm certainly not the only one.  The Wikipedia entry on the game, at the time I write this, reads:

Fresh from academy and in search of lost relics, a 21-year-old Lara Croft journeys to an island off the coast of Japan aboard the Endurance, a salvage vessel helmed by Captain Conrad Roth. Before anchoring at bay, the ship is cleaved in two by an unforeseen storm leaving Lara separated from any other survivors and washed ashore. She must endure physical and emotional torture in order to survive the island.

Because it will someday change: screenshot - 4:00 p.m. EDT, 16 June 2011.

I don't know, and can't know right now, how truly representative either demo I've linked is of the games they are promoting.  It is entirely possible that Nathan Drake spends two hours tied up and tortured and that Lara Croft never again screams in 40 hours of narrative.  It'll be many months yet before anyone can have anything to say about the rebooted Lara Croft, adventurer and protagonist.  If the Wikipedia article is correct, however, her new game is another iteration on "let's torture the attractive young white girl" survival horror.

Set aside the future.  In the present, the now, I'm tired of this same-old, same-old in marketing and demonstration.  The line between "victim" and "survivor" is a tricky distinction to navigate, and frankly I don't trust most game designers to be up to the task.  Torturing a female character is not new, it is not edgy, and in a media world that's still deeply oversaturated with images of victims and underpopulated with images of functional women, it's not a good idea.

*****

For further reading: A friend linked to this post this morning, on "manpain."  It's a good, long look at a general phenomenon in media and how male and female suffering on screen are used, displayed, and written.  And I realized something about the Tomb Raider demo while reading it: the manpain -- "oh, God, I suffer watching this woman's agony, pay attention to how horrible I think this is -- is meant to be the player's.  Lara is in the refrigerator to drive the player forward, which puts us right back in male gaze territory.

**The one truly vulnerable and prone to injury male protagonist I can think of is Old Snake, from Metal Gear Solid 4.  His vulnerabilities come from engineered illness and premature old age, rather than from his gender, but I will grant the exception.  That microwave tunnel is brutal.

Games vs. Gamers: E3 Edition

Hello, world. My name is Kate Cox, and I'm a gamer.  My 2011 obsessions are the Fallout and Mass Effect franchises, I was dedicated to MMORPG gaming for 6 years, I named my cat Guybrush, I can quote Cave Johnson speeches with the best of them, I play casual games on my PC and Android, and I'm planning to start catching up on the Deus Ex games next week so that I'm ready when Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes out this summer.

I'm also a woman.  I don't hide that one here on my own blog, but I'm stating it for the record.  I'm married to a gamer guy, but I had the games 20 years before I had him.  Gaming brought us together; he didn't "convince his girlfriend" to try it.

Why the recap of my life story?  Because apparently Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, and others still don't believe that I actually exist, and I'm not sure how else to convince them that I do.

I hadn't been planning to write about E3 at all; the shiny new things marketing circuit isn't really my beat.  But for some reason I ended up watching the streams of all of Monday's big press conferences, and then was home sick on Tuesday and so left the TV on G4 to catch that round as well.

(Okay, I'll admit it, we all know this was the "some reason.")

Where in the last 6 months in particular I have felt very comfortable writing about games and interacting (via Twitter and this blog, among other places) with other writers and with game designers, sometimes I get one of those heavy-handed reminders that I am still neither the target demographic of these products, nor a demographic these marketers particularly care about one way or the other.  I might, they concede, occasionally use the game machine that my husband, boyfriend, father, or brother insists on keeping in the living room, but the "core" games are best kept far away from me.

And how do the big companies tell me this?  Passively and actively.  Let's look at both.

Every person on stage for the Microsoft presentation was male... up until they got to the "soft" presentations of Kinect-ready non-core and non-gaming fluff.  For Mass Effect 3 Shepard and his player are both men, but for talking to the console and asking for it to find Lego, Star Wars, and Harry Potter titles for you, you have a woman.

In addition to the actual on-stage presence, there were issues of body language.  The men were nearly all standing, and assertively (although some were focused on playing their demos).  The first woman to appear on stage was seated, and spoke on cue.  The other girls and women to appear in the Microsoft event were mainly all in the "embarrassingly awkward and pointless" half of the line-up, with the exception of the female half of the two-player Dance Central team.  (Although dance games aren't my thing, I didn't find that team's presentation awkward or unbearable, and the dancers both worked equally hard.)  The one woman to be featured alone and not speaking on others' cues was there to show how her personal style can be scanned into an XBox Live avatar.

And then of course there was the Tomb Raider preview... featuring a screaming, moaning, bound and struggling woman.  This is the best they can do for Lara Croft?  This is the woman who, for 15 years, has been the go-to example for the "chest diameter does not equal protagonist incompetence" crowd.  She was the female answer to Indiana Jones, and the inspiration for the Uncharted franchise.  And now she's reduced to half-orgasmic torture porn screaming?

Granted, I don't know that a trailer or even a gameplay demo ever speaks accurately of the entire content of a game, but my opinion of the game is certainly less than stellar so far.  With a chance to reboot the franchise and take it beyond the "boobies hurr hurr hurr" demographic and into "intelligent action-adventure gaming," they've kept at least the marketing firmly planted in "male gaze" territory.

EA was no better, as far as gender representation.  Their games look excellent (not gonna lie, pretty much drooled on myself watching the Mass Effect 3 material, even in the complete absence of FemShep) but they certainly didn't seem inclined to acknowledge that women exist.  I also don't recall much in the way of any female presence at Sony's event, though it is possible I have forgotten.  The fourth major media circus of the day can be hard to remember.

All of that said, the lack of acknowledgement that I exist isn't the worst a company can do.  It's thoughtless, and shows the male privilege that a lot of the marketers, designers, and other relevant players have, but it's not malicious.  In fact, I'm going to say it's probably still better than what Ubisoft did.

Oh, Ubisoft.  I mean, really?  I've linked a nearly-full 76-minute video there, but everything wrong with it can be summed up in two words: Mr. Caffeine.

He (real name Aaron Priceman) is apparently a personality designed to market products to us.  Not a game designer, as so many of the awkward executive speakers at E3 are, but very obviously a salesman.  This is the person Ubisoft chose to emcee and to be the voice of their 2011 and 2012 blockbuster announcements.  And what did this corporate mouthpiece say?

You see, the world of technology has changed a lot since 1986, and so has gaming.  Today, 97% of young people play video games!  40% of them?  Are women!  And 89% of them?  Are smokin' hot.  I know this, I've investigated.

Now this has made a whole new group of pick-up lines available, I'm sure you guys know, like: "Hey! Wanna come over and play my Wii?"  "We should Kinect!"  "Hey, thanks for the Sony Move!  Here, hold my joy wand."  Yes, I'm not afraid of a few dick jokes, thank you.

In the video linked above, this segment runs from roughly 12:30 - 12:40.  However, notice the edit at 12:35, where it cuts to a wide shot?  All of the references to women (and their hotness) have been edited out.

To see the original, cue up to 12:33 in this version:

I really don't know what to make of the choice to edit the remark out of the first video.  On the one hand, someone clever realized just how boneheaded and offensive it was.  On the other hand, that script made it through rehearsal, onto the teleprompter, and out of Priceman's mouth before anyone clever managed to realize just how boneheaded and offensive it was.  I am just glad that I was able to find a copy of the original.

Mr. Caffeine there was right about one thing, though, and that was just how many of us laydeez are out there.  In fact, the 2011 ESA Survey does indicate that I'm in good company, and less alone than ever.  82% of gamers are over 18.  42% are girls or women.  And 37% of us are both.

Let's recap that: nearly 40% of all video game consumers are adult women.  Boys 17 and younger represent 13% of gamers.

This leaves us with the perennial conundrum, the question at the very heart of this entire blog: Why does gaming marketing remain so heavily focused on the juvenile few, and so exclusionary toward the adult many?  Faced with a true statistic -- that we form over 40% of a potential consumer base, just as we form roughly 50% of the actual population -- Ubisoft goes the stupid route.  They could embrace us, or at least tolerate us, or try in some way to convince us to buy their games.  Instead, they brainlessly alienate us, and keep setting us aside as the other.  (And the "pickup lines" weren't even funny; his entire presentation was a crime against comedy.)

Here's a protip, Ubisoft: it's not all Peggle out our way in female territory.  Some of us like games where you shoot stuff.  Some of us really like games where you're sneaky and stab stuff.  Oh, wait!  You make one of those!

So in the future, can we maybe skip the casual sexism and go right to the gaming?  (Because that really is a fantastic trailer, I like it more every time I watch it.)  You do that, and I won't object to giving you my money.  And hey, who knows: maybe giving you more of my hard-earned US dollars will convince you I exist.  In 25 years of your illustrious history it hasn't yet, but for a gamer hope springs eternal.